Hire Us

Product Manager

Location Sacramento, USA Type Full-time Experience 5+ years Team Product Openings 1 position

About the role

Most product roles drown you in ceremony: standups about standups, roadmaps nobody reads. This one doesn’t. As Product Manager you own the why and the what: you take a fuzzy idea, turn it into a plan the team actually believes in, and keep everyone pointed at outcomes, not output. Because Externo is a service-based consulting company, you won’t babysit one product forever. You’ll shape products across many clients and industries, from a fintech dashboard one quarter to an AI copilot the next.

You’ll sit between clients, design and engineering, framing the real problem before anyone writes a line of code, then steering the work until it ships and earns its keep. You set the direction and you’re trusted to make the call. There are no layers of sign-off to manage around here, just you, the team and the outcome you promised.

What you’ll do

  • Own the product direction, the roadmap and what ships first, across several clients at once.
  • Turn strategy, research and messy requirements into plans people can actually act on.
  • Keep design and engineering aligned on the outcome, not the ticket.
  • Define the metrics that matter, and hold the team, and yourself, to them.
  • Run tight discovery: talk to users, pressure-test assumptions, and kill the wrong ideas early.
  • Say the hard thing clearly, to clients and to the team, and keep everyone honest about trade-offs.

Skills & tools

The toolkit you’ll reach for most. You don’t need every one on day one, but you should be fluent across the core.

Core skills
  • Product strategy
  • Roadmapping
  • Discovery
  • Prioritisation
  • Metrics & analytics
  • Stakeholder management
  • Product writing
  • Technical fluency
Tools
  • Linear
  • Jira
  • Notion
  • Figma
  • Amplitude / Mixpanel
  • Basic SQL
  • Slack

What we’re looking for

  • 5+ years in product management, shipping real software.
  • A track record of products actually shipped, not just planned or pitched.
  • Strong analytical and communication skills, and the judgement to know which number matters.
  • You’re comfortable sitting in the technical and design trade-offs, not above them.
  • A bias toward outcomes over process, and toward clarity over ceremony.
  • You stay calm switching between industries, briefs and clients.

Nice to have

  • Experience with AI / LLM or data products.
  • A background in an agency, studio or consulting team juggling multiple clients.
  • Enough technical fluency to earn engineering’s trust and read the code when it counts.

Show us your work

A portfolio isn’t required, but real proof helps. If you have case studies or products you’ve shipped, drop the link in the Resume or portfolio link field on the right. We actually read them.

Is this you?

We hire for a specific kind of mind: people who think differently, work out of the box, and would rather try the less obvious idea than the safe one. We stay small and senior on purpose, so everyone here carries real weight.

Please only apply if you genuinely see yourself in this: a curious, self-driven product person whose work and values line up with ours. If that’s you, we’d love to meet you. If it isn’t, applying will only waste your time and ours, and we’d rather be honest about that up front.

About Externo

Externo is a service-based consulting company. Businesses bring us in as their outside team to design, build and ship digital and AI products that hold up in the real world, across strategy, UX, LLM features, agent workflows, data pipelines and web experiences. We’re senior, remote-first, and work embedded alongside our clients. Get to know us on our About page, see the services we offer, or read the Externo blog.